


World War Z: The Battlefield and the People Behind It

by Fools_Rush_In_TAZ



Category: World War Z - Max Brooks
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Suicide mention, Zombies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-23 20:52:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19709224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fools_Rush_In_TAZ/pseuds/Fools_Rush_In_TAZ
Summary: Further stories from the end of the world.





	World War Z: The Battlefield and the People Behind It

Honolulu, Hawaii,  
USA

[Dr. William Boig is a slight man, unassuming and gentle, not  
one you would assume to be the Surgeon General of the  
United States. He radiates calm like heat from a furnace.  
He arranged our meeting in his office in Honolulu; he  
heard about the stories I had been collecting, and volunteered  
his time to discuss the US postwar healthcare situation.  
He does not hesitate to discuss his personal wartime  
experience when I ask.]

What I remember most about the war was the hopelessness. It was everywhere. Not just in my office, and not just in group therapy, but all over. People were choking with it. You’d meet folks who were just glassed over, not focusing on anybody or anything. A lot of these were the people who would eventually succumb to Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome, but not all of them. A lot of them were just living out of habit.  
.  
Not that I was immune to it myself. Hell, I’m an anxious man. I swear to God, I didn’t think humanity was going to exist by the end of the war. I thought we were on the way out as a species. But as a shrink, it was my clinical responsibility to keep hope alive. I held on to hope like it was the last life preserver off the Titanic. I’ll be goddamned if I let a little thing like the end of the world kill me.

My practice was in Colorado, right on the frontier, so I had patients who had never seen a zombie coming from the west and patients who were fleeing from the east out of hell itself. I can’t decide which group was harder to work with, still to this day. The folks who had seen the dead walking up close and personal, those were people with specific issues we could work through. PTSD isn’t an easy problem to solve by any means, but at least there’s a great body of literature on it. I could treat them like I’d treat a combat veteran-which, in many ways, they were-and I could get them to face a new day. 

But the more privileged people from behind the Rocky Mountain line, they were tough to treat. They were sure the world was ending, but they didn’t have the hand-to-hand experience to know that the zombies were killable. They were just scared, and most of them couldn’t do anything about it. More prewar psych patients died of suicide than the undead, did you know that? I saw it up close and personal. That was back when guns were easy to come by, of course, before the federal restriction, but even afterwards, there were plenty of folks who just quit coming in, and then showed up on the news under a car or at the bottom of something tall.

See, America has always had a mental health problem. Mental health services have always been expensive, which means most of the people with the most to lose were absolutely unable to seek treatment. And there have never been enough mental health providers to cover even the most serious cases, let alone all the poor bastards out there suffering garden variety anxiety and depression. When World War Z broke out, those problems didn’t go away. Hell, they got so much worse. You know, I used to get a lot of patients who said, ‘what right do I have to be depressed when there’s rebels in Syria and Africa fighting against oppression? They have it worse than I do, and they don’t take mental health days.’ And the answer to that is, yeah, but they’re dying. What do you think the suicide rate was in Sub-Saharan Africa prior to the war? Mental illness destroys lives just as surely as zombies do, and causes more pain while it’s at it.

[So, what was your solution?]

I want to make it very clear, it wasn’t just my solution. I was the head of a coalition of mental health care providers, and we all worked together to break through in the face of a national health emergency. This was a group effort.

[Understood.]

Well, we had a couple of solutions. Training laypeople to be therapy group leaders definitely helped. Having anxiety sufferers lead anxiety groups, and eastern refugees lead refugee groups. When our initiative to organize those got federal funding, we made a huge dent in our suicide crisis. Of course, Roy Elliot and his film screenings were a godsend, but even the power of Hollywood couldn’t deal with what we were up against. The fact of the matter is, our therapists were spread thin, and most were unequipped to deal with the gravity of our issues. So, we had to seek an exotic solution.

[Hypnosis.]

It wasn’t a magic bullet, but it was damn good. When the NIH recognized hypnosis as a valid medical treatment, we were off to the races. It worked wonders on veterans. You could see day and night change after a couple of sessions. Intensive, in-patient hypnotic treatment was invaluable for the most severe cases, but common therapeutic hypnosis saved thousands of lives from self-destruction. I was fortunate to be an early practitioner of hypnosis in my practice. Helping people access their subconscious and process their least pleasant memories in a safe way was my life, and when the war broke out, it became my obsession.

[Any closing thoughts?]

Yes, I’d like to remind everyone that the National Suicide Hotline is still active, has been all through the war. If you or a loved one is showing signs of depression or suicidal thoughts or actions, give a call to 1-800-273-8255. They do good work over there, and as long as they're active, you can believe in good in the world.


End file.
